Last night I went into New York for Puzzled Pint, which was held outdoors in Central Park. It was my first time in NYC in a year and a half, my first time riding a train in a year and a half, my first time seeing
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I have signed up again for the Boswords crossword league, which I enjoyed doing in the fall. They release a puzzle every Monday night in March and April, you can either solve the puzzle simultaneously with everyone else on Monday night, or you have until Thursday to solve it, and then they tally times and post scores. At most, it's an hour a week ( Read more... )

I finished the Boswords fall crossword league in 219th place, out of 310 competitors in the hardest division. That sounds more impressive than it actually is: Many of the lowest scoring competitors on the chart missed a bunch of weeks so weren't really in the full league. And in fact there are people ahead of me on the table who skipped a week and ( Read more... )

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I signed up for the the Boswords crossword league, which is running weekly timed themeless puzzles through October and November on Monday nights. It has three divisions ranging from hardest cluing to easiest (all three use the same grid, they just use more or less obscure ways to clue words.) I decided to sign up in ( Read more... )

I have joked a lot that over the past months, puzzles have replaced a social life. It is not actually entirely a joke.

Puzzle stuff in my life:

- Puzzled Pint, virtually, every month, though we've pretty much adopted the policy that if the puzzle requires us to print out and cut things up, we skip the puzzle. So we didn't solve the meta this month.

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I've spent good portions of the past three days in bed because my back decided it wasn't happy with me... I think maybe my bike needs some readjustment, or I at least need to pay more attention to posture while riding. Probably also my work-from-home chair needs an upgrade. Also I am OLD now. Thankfully after taking off work yesterday to lie in bed ( Read more... )

My local puzzle hunting team met again this past week. One friend joined me last Wednesday, three others joined me Sunday, to work on the July issue of Panda Magazine. I solved the meta last night, and then backsolved the remaining puzzle. I haven't told the rest of the team yet about the backsolve, I'm seeing if they can solve the puzzle on their ( Read more... )

- The Indie 500 crossword puzzle competition released a set of crosswords-with-metas as a fundraiser for the competition, pay what you want. It's called "Where on the Globe Is Carla Sacramento?", and the combination of a Carmen Sandiego theming and crosswords was guaranteed to suck me in. I solved the first puzzle on my lunch break and thought it ( Read more... )

Last month I got together a local team to compete in the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, an online puzzle hunt run by a team that competes in the Mystery Hunt. It was a lot of fun, and it was really nice to be able to puzzle socially without having to travel. I suggested afterward that we keep up the fun by meeting up to work on the bimonthly Panda Magazine ( Read more... )

This past week was the third annual Galactic Puzzle Hunt, a weeklong online puzzle competition run by a team that competes in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I put together a local team of friends and we competed as best we could, which was almost exactly middle of the pack. 242nd out of about 500 teams competing ( Read more... )